Don't Cry For Me
by Lorata
Summary: When Rue dies, the nation weeps. When Thresh dies, it's a disappointment. He can't say he didn't see it coming. prompt: Thresh and Rue before the Games, district solidarity


The first time Thresh sees the little girl, he hates her so hard it digs into his gut and pulls everything out. Two seconds later the disgust catches up with him and he hates himself twice as much. It's a good thing his resting facial expression is a scowl, what with his face twenty feet high on the screen behind him.

She stands next to him, a quiet, pretty little girl, her head level with his elbow, her eyes big and brown and wide, and the crowd stays silent when their escort calls for applause. They applauded at Thresh's turn, though, of course they did. Big boy like him, strong and hard with eyes that say _I hate you_ because they can whip him for opening his mouth but they can't control everything, he looks like he could win it. He looks like he could murder a handful of other children and bring home enough food to feed the district for an entire year.

But that was before the little girl. Now no one's looking at Thresh. Now he's just another angry kid who might turn out a killer, but he's not a _tragedy_. Nobody will be sobbing into their popcorn over him when some mutt tears him to pieces. They might throw their betting slips across the room in disgust, but it ain't the same as a little girl with four even littler sisters standing there in the square, clinging to their Mama and crying.

Thresh loses the rest of the speech because the roaring in his brain drowns out everything else. Soon enough it's time to turn and head into the Justice Building, and the only consolation is that they get shuttled into separate rooms. This is bullshit enough without him having to stand there and listen to their messy goodbyes. Maybe if he doesn't have to see it, he won't think about the part where her Mama has four more children to see her through the loss when he's the only one his parents got.

He gets three minutes with them, and they're the longest and shortest three minutes of his life so far. Ma hugs him tight, and Thresh pulls her in close and tries not to think about how thin she feels in his arms. He was a big boy who came out breach, and he damn near killed her once and looks like he's going to do it again. Thresh looks over her shoulder at Pa, and the years might have dulled the blade of Pa's anger to a blunt edge but it's there now in his eyes, anger and despair and hopelessness. Thresh thinks of the first time he came back from the fields with his shirt in tatters and his back all over blood, and how Pa raged and burned but couldn't do nothing, just thanked the overseer for returning him in one piece.

They don't tell him to come back whatever it takes. Saying 'whatever it takes' means he's got to be prepared to do anything to do it and _that_ might mean wrapping his hands around that little girl's throat and pressing down until her big, brown eyes bug out and bruises mar her little neck.

"Do what you can," Ma says instead, and if nothing else her voice is strong. Pa's eyes say what he won't, that if Thresh walked back here with that little girl's blood on his hands Pa would find a way to live with it, but maybe if they don't say it aloud that won't make it real.

In his head, the little girl's smallest sister unwraps a hair ribbon from her pigtails and hands it over, eyes wide and solemn, and her Mama wraps it around her hair and ties it tight. Or maybe she loops it around the little girl's wrist instead, pressed against the pulse point so she can feel it with every heartbeat.

Thresh will have no token because they got nothing to give him. Except that Ma takes his hands and pulls him over to the hard bench - too short, too thin, nothing ever fits Thresh here - and sits down beside him, strokes her hand over his forehead and begins to sing.

Funny enough, it's Pa who breaks. He turns his back, and his shoulders shake and he sucks in big, wet breaths while his fists clench, but Ma just keeps singing, her voice never cracking, never hesitating. It's his cradle song, and Thresh has heard it so often that it creeps into his dreams even now, when he's too old to hear it except once a year on his birthday when Ma says she's allowed and he can hush up and stop trying so hard to grow away from her. He turns nineteen in two weeks, and this will be the first year in his memory that she's not there on the side of his bed when it's time for sleep, her voice rich and warm in the hot summer air.

As soon as he steps out of this room, the cameras will be on him, and they won't stop until twenty-three kids are dead and maybe never after. They're probably watching this, too, but the footage from the Justice Building never gets aired and that's good enough to count as the last private moment Thresh will have in his life. This ain't how Thresh planned it, but he leans forward until his forehead rests against Ma's shoulder while she gives him one last gift, the freedom to soak the coarse linen of her dress with nobody watching.

"You take that with you," Ma says when she finishes, and she pulls back and wipes Thresh's eyes with two firm swipes of her thumbs. "We'll be watching. Until -" And now she falters, her face jerking like somebody slapped her, and she tries again. "We'll be watching you," she says finally.

Pa's got himself under control now, and he grips Thresh's shoulder hard enough to hurt and offers his handkerchief so Thresh won't leave the room with snot on his sleeve. "We love you," he says, and Thresh still hasn't said a damn word to either of them. But then the Peacekeeper opens the door and yanks them out, and now it's too late and Thresh never will again.

It's easier after that, standing on the train platform while the crowd in front of him sobs for the little girl, though a few with their eyes on the prize catch Thresh's gaze and raise their fists in preemptive triumph. Thresh stares out without making eye contact with anyone, letting his face harden into the mask he wears when the overseer raises his whip and tells him to walk to the stocks. It's familiar even if the situation isn't, and it carries Thresh through the last of the goodbyes until they're on the train and the doors slide shut behind him.

The little girl sits down in one of the big plush chairs, smoothing her Reaping dress over her skinny knees. Thresh grits his teeth and sits in a chair on the far side of the room, steeling himself for when she asks him to protect her because he can't, he won't. The last thing he wants to do is be in the final two with her. He tries to hold onto the anger that gripped him on stage, that dark, sliding fury and envy and everything else, but she's so small and so young and she's going to die and it won't be Thresh who does it. It _won't._

She lets out a breath and this is it, here it comes - except instead of begging, she looks out the window. "I want you to stay away from me in there," she says, low and quiet and calm. There's a tremor underneath but she holds it steady, and Thresh raises an eyebrow before he can stop himself. "They'll want to see us together but I know what it means in the end. They all do. I don't want that."

Thresh drums one finger against his forearm. "No District 11 solidarity?" The words are bitter on his tongue like the time he was a boy and picked a handful of pretty blue berries before Ma caught him and smacked his head so hard he spat them out. He had a dull headache for days, like an icepick behind his eyes, and it starts up again now.

"Let someone else kill me," she says, a pretty little thing with big brown eyes and soft brown skin saying words like that, and Thresh hates everyone and everything. "That's enough solidarity."

The train lurches forward, and Thresh presses his forehead against the window to watch home disappear behind them until their mentors show up.


End file.
